Salzburger Vorstadt 15, 5280, Braunau am Inn: The Dilemma of what to do about Hitler’s Birthplace

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, International Relations, Memorabilia, National politics, Regional History

Adolf Hitler was born in the small Upper Austrian town Braunau am Inn on the border with the German state of Bavaria. The future German führer’s association with Braunau am Inn was only a fleeting one…after Adolf’s birth in the three-story yellow corner house—a gasthaus (guesthouse) which later was a gasthof (ale house)—the Hitler family only stayed in Braunau am Inn until 1892, when Hitler’s father’s work as a customs official took them to Passau, further down the Inn River border but on the German side. 

(Archival image: Stadtverein Braunau)

When the Nazis annexed the Austria state in 1938 the street of Hitler’s birth Salzburger Vorstadt was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Straße, in time for the führer’s one and only return to the town of his birth since he left at aged three –  passing swiftly through Braunau am Inn on the way to Vienna to celebrate the Anschluß. From this time Hitler’s birthplace became a cult centre attracting hordes of fawning devotes to Hitler, creating a pilgrimage site for the Nazi “true-believers”. At the end of WWII the town surrendered to the US Army and No 15 as part of the historic city centre was eventually granted heritage status➀. Rented since the Fifties by the Austrian republic, the building had provided makeshift premises for a public library, a bank, technical high school classes, a day centre for people with learning difficulties.

(Photo: The Guardian)

During the last decade the Austrian government, still renting Salzburger Vorstadt 15 from its original family owner (Gerlinde Pommer), has kept it unoccupied, fearful that it was in danger of becoming a shrine for Neo-Nazi sympathisers (and their regular visits were also bringing anti-fascist protestors to the site as well) [‘Austria wants to appropriate Hitler’s birth house to stop it from becoming neo-Nazi shrine’, Daily Sabah, 09-Apr-2016, www.dailysabah.com]. The building has no identifiable signage on it but a concentration camp stone memorial dedicated to the victims of Nazism stands in front (Hitler is not mentioned in the inscription).

Braunauers, saddled with the legacy of their quiet, backwater town being forever associated with the Nazi führer, have long held divided opinions over what to do with the property locals refer to as the “Hitler-haus”. Some wanted to demolish all trace of it, to replace it with a new purpose-built building (a refugee centre, a museum dedicated to the Austrian liberation from Nazi rule, etc), or to leave it as an empty, amorphous space (an option extensively criticised because it could infer that Austria was trying to bury a part of its dark past). With such heat generated over the controversial site, its not surprising that the government in Vienna too has vacillated over what to do with it➁ [Adolf Hitler’s first home set to be demolished for new buildings, The Guardian, 17-Oct-2016, www.theguardian.com].

(Artist’s impression of the renovation)

In 2016, the Austrian government, frustrated at the owner’s refusal to renovate the property to make it suitable to desirable tenants, or to negotiate the building’s future, indicated its intent to demolish it and rebuild anew. In 2017 after a court ruling in the government’s favour the building was expropriated…this year Vienna has flipped the 2016 decision, now deciding that the existing structure will stay in place but will undergo significant change to its outward appearance and be given a new life. The change of plan will see the renovated building becoming a police station for Braunau and the district (slated for completion at end 2022 at a cost of €2 million) [‘Adolf Hitler’s birthhouse to be remodeled by architects’, DW, 05-Jul-2020, www.dw.com]. Repurposing Salzburger Vorstadt 15 as a police station with a (1750 townhouse style) design that predates the period of Hitler’s residence, according to the authorities, has the intention to deter Neo-Nazis from congregating at the site in the future [‘Adolf Hitler’s Birthplace Will be Transformed Into a Police Station to ‘Neutralize’ Its Appeal as a Pilgrimage Site for Neo-Fascists’, (Kate Brown), Artnet News, 03-Jun-2020, www.artnet.com].

 

Postscript: The decision to radically makeover the four centuries-old building that was Hitler’s birthplace won’t please the cultural and heritage groups in Upper Austria, but that the building has not been obliterated leaving only a blank, anonymous space has been welcomed by others. As one architecture professor notes, the creation of ”a void into which any kind of meaning can be projected” does not necessarily solve the dilemma, witness the aftermath of the 1952 dynamiting of Berghof (Hitler’s Bavarian mountain hideaway). Despite there being nothing to see any more, tourists kept coming in droves, as did Neo-Nazis who left their calling cards [‘The house where Hitler was born could be demolished soon. Here’s why it should stay standing’, (Despina Stratigakos), Quartz, 31-Oct-2016, www.quartz.com].

(Photo: The Guardian)

_____________________________________________

➀ in the decades following the war, along with curious tourists, Austrian and German veterans, especially on Hitler’s birthday, made the trek to the house [‘Hitler’s Birth Home in Austria to Become a Police Station’, (Melissa Eddy), New York Times, 20-Nov-2019, www.nytimes.com]

➁ the Ministry of the Interior in Vienna was also under flack from the media and the public for the extravagance of paying Frau Pommer nearly €5,000 every month to rent a space it was putting to no practical use [‘Why the Austrian government won’t tear down Adolf Hitler’s birth home’, (Bianca Bharti), National Post, 05-Sep-2019, www.nationalpost.com]

The Brazilian Empire of the Braganzas: Endgame Emperor, Dom Pedro II’s Rule

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Comparative politics, International Relations, Military history, National politics, Regional History

Pedro II’s reign as emperor of Brazil started in the least propitious of circumstances. The first and immediate threat to the longevity of his rule was that he was only five-years-old when he acceded, necessitating a regency in Brazil until he came of age to rule in his own right. The other obstacle was that Brazil was still a fledgling empire wracked by political instability. Civil wars and factionalism plagued the empire, a vast region posing extremely formidable challenges to rule … between 1831 and 1848 there were more than 20 minor revolts including a Muslim slave insurrection and seven major ones (some of these were by secessionist movements). Pedro II had more success in foreign policy, the empire expanded at the expense of neighbours Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay as the result of a series of continental wars. Some early historians saw Dom Pedro’s long reign in Brazil (1831-1889) as prosperous, enlightened and benevolent (he freed his own slaves in 1840) [Martin, Percy Alvin. “Causes of the Collapse of the Brazilian Empire.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 4, no. 1 (1921): 4-48. Accessed December 3, 2020. doi:10.2307/2506083.], certainly the emperor was viewed widely as a unifying force in Brazil for a good two-thirds of his reign.

1870s, on a course for turbulent waters in the empire
From the 1870s onward however the consensus in favour of the rule of Pedro the ‘Unifier’ had started to show signs of fraying. The institutions that formed the three main pillars of the empire’s constitutional monarchical system—the landowning planter class, the Catholic clergy and the armed forces—were all becoming gradually disaffected from the regime, as were the new professional classes.

The landowning elite
Pedro II’s reign came to an end in 1889 with his overthrow. The pretext for the removal of the Brazilian monarchy, according to the conventional thesis, was grievances of the planter oligarchy at the abolition of slavery (The Golden Law, 1888), which Dom Pedro had given his imprimatur to (CH Haring). This view holds that the landowners❋ deserted the monarchy for the republic because they were not compensated properly for their loss of slaves (Martin). This conclusion has been challenged by Graham et al on several grounds: the plantation owners dominated the imperial government of Pedro making them complicit in the decision to abolish slavery (ie, why would they be acting against their own interests?); many slave-owning planters favoured abolition because it brought an end to the mass flight of slave from properties; the succeeding republic government itself did not indemnify planters for their loss of slaves. More concerning than the abolition of slavery to the planters, in Graham’s view, was the introduction of land reform, something they were intent on avoiding at all costs. The planter oligarchs were willing to concede the end of the slave system so long as it forestalled land reform, the linchpin to real change in the society. Siding with the republicans, Graham concedes, was a calculated risk on their part, as there were many radical and reformist abolitionists¤ under the pro-republic umbrella with a very different agenda (national industrialisation) to them, but one they were willing to take⚉ [Hahner ; Graham, Richard. “Landowners and the Overthrow of the Empire.” Luso-Brazilian Review 7, no 2 (1970): 44-56. Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3512758.]

🔺 Slaves on a fazenda (coffee farm), 1885

The clergy
The conservative Catholic hierarchy were traditional backers of the emperor and the empire in Brazil. But a conflict of state in the 1870s between secularism and ultramontanism (emphasis on the strong central authority of the pope) undermined the relationship. This religious controversy involving the irmandades (brotherhood) drove a rift between the Brazilian clergy and the monarchy [Hahner, June E. “The Brazilian Armed Forces and the Overthrow of the Monarchy: Another Perspective.” The Americas 26, no. 2 (1969): 171-82. Accessed December 3, 2020. doi:10.2307/980297].

The national army
The army had long-standing resentments about its treatment in Brazilian society…its low wages and the lack of a voice in the imperial cabinet were simmering grievances. Understandable then that together with the republicans, they were in the forefront of the coup against the monarchy, the pronunciamento (military revolt) that occurred in 1889. A key and popular figure influencing the younger officer element away from support for the monarchy was Manuel Deodoro da Fonseca (Marechal de campo in the army). Marshal Deodoro assumed the nominal leadership of the successful coup. Swept up in the turmoil of republican agitation, Deodoro, despite being a monarchist, found to his surprise that he had been elected the republic’s first president. The coup has been described as a “barrack room conspiracy” involving a fraction of the military whose “grievances (were) exploited by a small group of determined men bent on the establishment of the Republic” (Martin).

🔺 Allegory depicting Emperor Pedro’s farewell from Brazil (Image: Medium Cool)

Revolution from above
Historians have noted that the 1889 ‘revolution’ that toppled Pedro II was no popular revolution…it was “top-down”, elite-driven with the notable absence of participation from the povo (“the people”) in the process (Martin). In fact the emperor at the time still retained a high level of popularity among the masses who expressed no great enthusiasm to change the status quo of Brazil’s polity.

The Braganza monarchy, hardly a robust long-term bet
With the health of the ageing Dom Pedro increasingly a matter of concern, the viability of Brazil’s monarchy came under scrutiny. For the military the emperor was not a good role model, Pedro’s own pacifist inclinations did not gel well with the army’s martial spirit. The issue of succession was also a vexed one…Princess Isabel who deputised several times when Dom Pedro was called away to Europe was thought of as a weak heir to the crown. She did not enjoy a positive public perception and Pedro’s transparent failure to exhibit confidence in her did little to bolster her standing, contributing to a further erosion of support for the monarchy [Eakin, M. (2002). Expanding the Boundaries of Imperial Brazil. Latin American Research Review, 37(3), 260-268. Retrieved December 3, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1512527]. The Brazilian monarchical state has been characterised as a kind of monarchy-lite which contributed to its lack of longevity – viz it failed to forge an hereditary aristocracy with political privileges, its titles mere honorifics not bestowing social privilege in Brazilian society. So that, by 1889, the empire had been reduced to a “hollow shell” ready to collapse (Martin).

A loose-knit empire?
One perspective of the 19th century empire focuses on the sparseness and size of Brazil’s territorial expanse. Depreciating its status as an ‘empire’, this view depicts it as being in reality comprising something more like a “loose authority over a series of population clusters (stretching) from the mouth of the Amazon to the Río Grande do Sul” (Eakin). The lack of imperial unification, according to another view of the course of its history, surfaced as an ongoing struggle between the periphery (local politics) and the centre (national government), resulting in the weakening of the fabric of the polity [Judy Bieber, cited in Eakin].

Landless and disenfranchised
Other issues in addition white-anted the legitimacy of Dom Pedro’s regime, notably the shrinking of the franchise. By 1881 the number of Brazilians eligible to vote had dropped alarmingly – less than 15% of what it had been just seven years earlier in 1874. And this trend was not corrected by the succeeding republic regime, portending a problematic future for Brazilian harmony because with the new republic came a rapid boost in immigration [‘The Old or First Republic, 1889-1930’, (Country Studies), www.countrystudies.us].

The cards in Brazil were always stacked in favour of the landed elite, an imbalance set in virtual perpetuity after the 1850 Land Law which restricted the number of Brazilians who could be landowners (condemning the vast majority to a sharecropper existence). The law concentrated land in fewer hands, ie, that of the planters, while creating a ready, surplus pool of labour for the plantations [Emília Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (2000)].

Structural seeds of the empire’s eclipse
One theory locates Brazil’s imperial demise squarely in a failure to implement reform. The younger Pedro’s empire, projecting a rhetoric of liberalism which masked an anti-democratic nature, remained to the end unwilling to reform itself. The planter elite, with oligopolistic economic control and sway over the political sphere, maintained a rigid traditional structure of production—comprising latifúndios (large landholdings), slavery and the export of tropical productions (sugar, tobacco, coffee)—while stifling reform initiatives and opposing industrialisation [McCann, Frank D. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 18, no. 3, 1988, pp. 576–578. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/203948. Accessed 3 Dec. 2020]. Another criticism of the monarchical government concerns its economic performance. Detractors point to the regime’s failure to take the opportunities afforded by the world boom in trade after 1880, a consequence of which was that powerful provincial interests opted for a federal system [‘The Brazilian Federal State in the Old Republic (1889-1930): Did Regime Change Make a Difference?’, (Joseph L. Love), Lemann Institute of Brazilian Studies, University of Illinois, www.avalon.utadeo.edu.co/]

Primeira República, “King Coffee” and industrial development
Initially the political ascendency in the First Republic lay with the urban-based military. However within a few years the government complexion was changed. The ‘Paulistas’, a São Paulo civilian cliche of landowners, elbowed the ineffectual Deodora aside. Exploiting differences between the army and the navy, the landowning elite then edged the remaining uniformed ministers out of the cabinet [Hahner], consolidating the “hegemonic leadership” of monolithic Paulista coffee planters in the republic✪.The First (or Old) Republic (1889-1930) was marked by uneven, stop-start spurts of industrialisation together with high level production of coffee for export. The Old Republic ended with another coup by a military junta in 1930 which in turn led to the Vargas dictatorship [Font; Graham].

Río de Janeiro, 1889 🔺

Endnote: The anomalous Brazilian empire of the 19th century
During its 60-plus years of existence Brazil’s empire stood out among the post-colonial states of 19th century Central and South America as the single viable monarchy in a sea of republicanism. Briefly on two occasions it was joined by México, also a constitutional monarchy but one that didn’t truly take root. On the second occasion the fated Emperor Maximilian—who was Pedro II’s first cousin—tried to forge an imperial network of sorts with Brazil.

🔺 Confederados of Americana, Brazil (Photo: Business Insider)

PostScript: Confederados in Brazil
After the South’s defeat in the American Civil War, Pedro II, wanting to cultivate cotton in the empire, invited Southerners to settle in Brazil which still practiced slavery (others went to México or to other Latin American states, even to Egypt). Estimates of between 10 and 20 thousand took up Dom Pedro’s offer, settling mainly in São Paulo. Most of these Confederados found the hardships too challenging and returned home after Reconstruction, some however stayed on in Brazil with their descendants still living in places like the city in São Paulo named Americana [‘The Confederacy Made Its Last Stand in Brazil’, (Jesse Greenspan), History, upd. 22-Jun-2020, www.history.com].

⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯ ⎯

❋ a dominant force in Brazilian economics and society which had benefitted from the 1850 Brazilian land law which restricted the number of landowners

¤ such as Joaquim Nabuco

⚉ the planter elite decided in the end that a governo federal system would better protect their land monopolisation than the empire could (Graham)

✪ coffee from Minas Gerais, Río de Janeiro and especially São Paulo plantations were the mainstay of the Brazilian economy (Font)

The Brazilian Empire of the Braganzas: Founder-Emperor, Dom Pedro I’s Rule

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Comparative politics, International Relations, Military history, National politics, Regional History

Brazil at the start of the 19th century was the jewel in the imperial crown of Portugal, the kingdom’s largest and richest colony. In 1808 Napoleonic aggression had taken the European-wide war to the Iberian Peninsula. An inadvertent consequence of the invasion set Brazil on the path to independence. Portuguese prince regent, the future João VI (or John VI), not wanting to emulate the Spanish royals’ circumstance (incarcerated in a French Prison at Emperor Napoleon’s pleasure) fled Portugal for Brazil, reestablishing the Portuguese royal court in Río de Janeiro.

Dom Pedro o Libertador, an empire of his own

João returned to Lisbon as king of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves on the wave of the Liberal ‘Revolution’ (1820), leaving son Pedro as regent to rule Brazil in his stead. Unfortunately for him Pedro had his own plans, defying his father and the Portuguese motherland, he split Brazil off from Portugal. In a famous “I am staying” speech (Dia do Pico), Pedro rebuffed the demands of the Cortes (parliament) in Lisbon that he yield. Pedro’s timing was good, his move won the backing of the Brazilian landed class. [‘Pedro I and Pedro II‘, (Brazil: Five Centuries of Change), www.library.brown.edu]. Militarily, he met only limited resistance from Portuguese loyalists to his revolt. Aided by skilful leadership of the Brazilian fleet by ace navy admiral, the Scot mercenary Lord (Thomas) Cochrane, Pedro triumphed over his opponents with a relatively small amount of bloodshed, declaring himself emperor of Brazil in late 1822 and receiving the title of “Perpetual-Defender of Brazil”.

(Source: Bibliothèque National)

Pedro, despite benefiting from the able chief-ministership of José Bonifácio, soon found his imperial state on a rocky footing, embroiled in a local war with the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. In the conflict, Brazil’s southern Cisplatine province, encouraged by the Argentines, broke away from the empire, eventually re-forming as the independent republic of Uruguay (both Brazil and Argentina during this period harboured designs on the territory of Uruguay). On João VI’s death in 1826 Pedro I became king of both Portugal and Brazil, but immediately abdicated the Portuguese throne in favour of his daughter Maria II [‘Biography of Dom Pedro I, First Emperor of Brazil’, (Christopher Minster), ThoughtCo., Upd.15-May-2019, www.thoughtco.com]

Politics within the ruling House of Braganza in this time were turbulent, both in Portugal and Brazil. The king’s younger brother Miguel (“o Usurpador”) usurped the throne of the under-aged Maria, causing Pedro I to also abdicate the Brazilian throne and return to Europe to try to restore the crown to his daughter Maria. Pedro’s five-year-old son, Pedro II, succeeded him in a minority as the new emperor of Brazil in 1831. In Portugal Dom Pedro gathered an army and engaged in what was effectively a civil war between liberals and conservatives who were seeking a return to the rule of absolutism. The war spread into Spain merging into the larger First Carlist War, a war of succession to determine who would assume the Spanish throne. The Portuguese conflict was decided in favour of Dom Pedro and the liberals, but not long after in 1834 Pedro I died of TB.

A whiff of Lusophobia in the Brazilian air

Pedro I’s abdication of the Brazilian throne provoked a brief outbreak of Lusophobia (hatred of the Portuguese) in Brazil. Triggered by perceptions that Lisbon harboured designs to restore Brazil by force to its colonial empire, some Brazilians in a frenzy randomly attacked Portuguese property and killed a number of Portuguese-born residents [‘In the Shadow of Independence: Portugal, Brazil, and Their Mutual Influence after the End of Empire (late 1820s-early 1840s’, (Gabriel Paquette), e-Journal of Portuguese History, versão On-line ISSN 1645-6432, vol.11, no. 2 Porto 2013].

Caedmon to Audible: From Spoken-Word LPs to Audio Book Bonanza

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Creative Writing, Leisure activities, Literary & Linguistics, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Old technology, Popular Culture

The “Groundhog Day” existence of coronavirus, with people ‘sentenced’ to indeterminable periods of isolation and lockdown inside four square walls, has been a boon to the pursuit of leisure activities※. Social media platforms have gone “gang-busters” – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Zoom, and Snapchat and TikTok (for the Gen-Zs) among others. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Stan, ditto. In this year like no other, Audible tell us that audio books are more popular than ever – a trend promoted undoubtedly by Audible’s own deft marketing (eg, during Covid-19 they are streaming a selection of children’s stories free to the public). The uptake of Borrow Box loan activity in 2020 underscores this assertion.

Cohen & Roney 1952: taking the 1st steps for audio booksellers (Photo: Lib of Congress Blogs)

Audio books (ABs) in one form or another have been around a long time, arguably the pioneer in the area of spoken-word records was Caedmon Records, the first to hit the mark with a mainstream audience. The Caedmon company evolved out of the initiatives in 1952 of two 22-year-old female college graduates (Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney) in the US to record a poetry reading by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The popularity of the poetry album which included A Child’s Christmas in Wales laid the groundwork for today’s AB industry. The development of technology assisted the progression of “spoken books”… from the first LPs (Long-playing records), emerging in the 1930s, which gave way to tape cassettes in the 1960s and 70s, which in turn lead later still to compact discs [‘Caedmon Records and Audiobooks, (HarperCollins), www.200.hc.com].

My own personal history as a consumer of spoken-word records begins with the aforementioned Caedmon, circa 1977. In the mid-Seventies I had watched several films in a series of commercial releases under the title “American Film Theatre”, film adaptations of a number of well-known plays…the series which utilised Lord Olivier as its promotional face included Galileo (Brecht), Rhinoceros (Ionesco), Luther (Osborne), The Homecoming (Pinter) and The Iceman Cometh (O’Neill).

At the time I came across vinyl 78s of two of the plays-to-films in the series—Butley (Simon Gray) and A Delicate Balance (Edward Albee)—in a tiny spoken-word section of a second-hand record shop. Snapping them up, this marked my first foray into the (at that time) still embryonic world of collecting ABs.

Audio books then were pretty much unknown in retail record departments and shops… major book retailers were yet to cotton on to the potentiality of thus broadening the market for their products, and online goliaths like Amazon were yet to come into existence. I remember that I got my first spoken-word cassette by (pre-online) mail order from the Royal Blind Society in 1978. The RBS had more incentive than anyone else to embrace “talking books”⋓, an innovation which opened up a whole new world of leisure for the visually-impaired. The first (double cassette) AB that I purchased was a BBC recording of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.

Since that time the audio book industry has exploded with heavyweights like Hachette Audio, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster, all with significant “skin in the game”. Lording over all these competitors is Audible (Amazon), unchallenged as the dominant market leader. Even before the pandemic the global AB market was valued at US$2.67 Bn in 2019 (wwwgrandviewresearchcom/]. The coronavirus is sending that worldwide sales trajectory even higher (US audio unit sales are up 16% dwarfing the book market growth of the industry as a whole (wwwthenewpublishingstandardcom/)).

The success of audio books has been welcomed by the book industry as a positive addition (cf. the advent of Kindle and e-books which raised fears of ‘cannibalisation’ of the main product)⊞. The takeaway from the AB phenomena is that the aural experience is a different one, and that ABs (according to a Deloitte report) tend to attract a younger demographic that is less inclined to read print books [‘A word in your ear…why the rise of audiobooks is a story worth celebrating’, (Alex Preston), The Guardian, 02-Aug-2020, www.theguardian.com].


The versatility of audio books is behind its blossoming into an integral part of the literature landscape for ‘readers’. ABs can be integrated easily into one’s life in all manner of ways that are not confined to a sedentary or stationary state – while exercising, walking, jogging, cycling, in the gym, while cooking, doing housework, driving a car, commuting, etc [‘Audiobooks: The rise and rise of the books you don’t read’, (Clare Thorp), BBC, 06-Jan-2020, www.bbc.com].

For many buyers of audio books a factor in choosing a title is the reader itself. Having “A-list talent” and the “dulcet tones of a familiar voice” as reader certainly can add value to the product✦, but big names only work if they have a genuine connexion with the material (Thorp). Some ABs work better when the author doubles as reader, this particularly applies to memoirs and non-fiction titles. Having this can convey to the listener a more authentic experience of the subject’s journey. For myself, the AB experience that I most enjoyed was John Lithgow’s brilliant reading of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Character actor Lithgow brought such an energy to the reading, greatly enhancing the flavour and tone of Wolfe’s biting satire on greed and status in NYC (in marked contrast to the disappointing Tom Hanks movie version), probably my all-time favourite AB.

Another memorable audio book collection I would place high on my AB order of merit are the recordings of Samuel Pepys’ Diaries (readings by Kenneth Branagh and a BBC dramatisation). From both sets of recordings I got a real “living history” insight into Pepys’ thought processes and compromised behaviour—flaws and virtues, so redolent of that of the modern bureaucrat—and of the everyday life of an event-filled London in late Stuart Britain.

One of the reasons I took to audio books is that it offered me a way into critically acclaimed works of fiction that in print form I had found Sphinx-like and impenetrable. Back in the 1970s I made several attempts at reading the 754 abstruse and puzzling pages of Joyce’s Ulysses before raising the white flag in defeat. Ulysses’ emergence in the AB format in the, must be late Eighties/early Nineties (albeit in an abridged four-CD form) was the key I needed to unlock the stylistic labyrinth of Joyce’s prose. ABs also let me get a handle on that other Irish author of literary complexity Flann O’Brien, and his convoluted metafiction maze The Third Policeman.

FN: Cædmon
Caedmon, the name chosen by Cohen and Roney for their revolutionary business enterprise, was the name of the first known English poet (flourished late Seventh century AD), a Northumbrian cowherd turned exponent of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) verse poetry.

——————-——————-——————-—————

※ another pastime, gaining impetus in the lockdown and perhaps capturing the zeitgeist of 2020 is doomscrolling – the social media practice of continuing to read long streams of news feeds which are disheartening in content

⋓ the term as I recall more in currency at the time than audio books

⊞ print books managed to repulse the challenge from e-books in part due to pricing strategies which disincentivised e-book purchasing [Amazon’s Audiobook Boom’, (Alex Shepard), The New Republic, O3-Jul-2018, www.newrepublic.com]

✦ the rise of ABs has provided a source of peripheral work for some actors, a very welcome and in some cases lucrative sideline